I just got my Vegas 5 in yesterday around 3:30 PM and haven’t stopped playing with the network rendering since then it’s almost 9:30 am now! I have to say I am really impressed with the network rendering though I was really not expecting much after reading all the other users post about how it didn’t work that good. This has to be one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. Let me give you the specs on my computers and network.
Edit machine
P4 3GHz
1Gig ram
WinXP Pro
Gigabit NIC
Vegas 5 Full
several large HD’s yada-yada-yada
but the kicker is I have a gigabit switch that I picked up from Compusa for $99.00
File server
Server 2k3
Dual Xeon 3 Ghz
4 Gig ram
800 GB Raid 5 drives
Gigabit Nic
Render Node
(all my video and media reside on this machine)
Toshiba Laptop
P4 3Ghz
1 Gb Ram
80 Gb HD
XP Pro
100 MB Nic (unfortunately I can’t find any one that makes a PCMCIA Gigabit NIC ;-)
Render Node
This is what I have come up with so far…
After trying to get it working for like two hours, which entailed having to set all my computers “Primary DNS suffix of this computer” underneath the computer name tab
And figuring out what I was doing wrong with the file mappings – They really need to have better instructions on this…
I ran some of these tests two and three times with the same settings to make sure I had not made a mistake because I couldn’t believe that it was getting done so quick on some tasks compared to stand alone rendering.
One thing I noticed is stitching across network on 100Mb with default is terrible (unless all your media is on your edit computer) it’s like it pulls each one of the individual files over the network then sends the stitched file back over and repeats this step over and over whereas when you specify the file server as the Render Host it just stitches it locally. On a gigabit network it’s really not a big difference maybe 5-10% slower but on a 100Mb it is incredibly slow so if all you have is a 100Mb network make sure you specify the Render Host as the computer that actually host’s the media on the timeline. The way I am setup is all my videos and media I keep on the server and edit across the network which for most people may be backwards but my server has tons of storage and is very fast.
Gigabit seems to help by about 50-60%
Tests I ran
Render alone with two Magic bullet FX’s this was kind of overkill but I wanted to test it out, the clip was only 30 seconds long ouch….
19:01 minutes when ran with no network rendering
Gigabit Settings
6:05 when nodes set to gigabit and host was set to file server.
(That’s insane imagine if that 30 second clip were an hour long that would take 36 Hours but rendered on my setup with network rendering would roughly be 12 Hours!)
6:15 when all nodes were on at Gigabit and host was on edit machine not file server
100 Mb Settings
8:27 seconds when host was set to file server and all network settings were at 100Mb
22:58 when the default host was my edit machine and not the server while set at 100 mb
A video clip that was 2:44 seconds long with a mild secondary color correction took
22:29 render stand alone
Gigabit Settings
3:02 default Host Render
2:47 file server Host Render Near real time!
100 Mb Network settings
Default Host Render - Stopped it at 11% on the stitching part it was near 15 minutes blah couldn’t wait!
5:31 file server Host Render
Man this is awesome!!!!
The only thing is I wish they would change the limit of two render nodes, or at least let us by additional ones individually for say $25.00 or something it seems really strange that it goes from either 2 nodes to a site license which I don’t even want to no the price on that.
Oh and if some of my calculations are off go ahead correct me I’m to tired to care at this point ;-)
Edit machine
P4 3GHz
1Gig ram
WinXP Pro
Gigabit NIC
Vegas 5 Full
several large HD’s yada-yada-yada
but the kicker is I have a gigabit switch that I picked up from Compusa for $99.00
File server
Server 2k3
Dual Xeon 3 Ghz
4 Gig ram
800 GB Raid 5 drives
Gigabit Nic
Render Node
(all my video and media reside on this machine)
Toshiba Laptop
P4 3Ghz
1 Gb Ram
80 Gb HD
XP Pro
100 MB Nic (unfortunately I can’t find any one that makes a PCMCIA Gigabit NIC ;-)
Render Node
This is what I have come up with so far…
After trying to get it working for like two hours, which entailed having to set all my computers “Primary DNS suffix of this computer” underneath the computer name tab
And figuring out what I was doing wrong with the file mappings – They really need to have better instructions on this…
I ran some of these tests two and three times with the same settings to make sure I had not made a mistake because I couldn’t believe that it was getting done so quick on some tasks compared to stand alone rendering.
One thing I noticed is stitching across network on 100Mb with default is terrible (unless all your media is on your edit computer) it’s like it pulls each one of the individual files over the network then sends the stitched file back over and repeats this step over and over whereas when you specify the file server as the Render Host it just stitches it locally. On a gigabit network it’s really not a big difference maybe 5-10% slower but on a 100Mb it is incredibly slow so if all you have is a 100Mb network make sure you specify the Render Host as the computer that actually host’s the media on the timeline. The way I am setup is all my videos and media I keep on the server and edit across the network which for most people may be backwards but my server has tons of storage and is very fast.
Gigabit seems to help by about 50-60%
Tests I ran
Render alone with two Magic bullet FX’s this was kind of overkill but I wanted to test it out, the clip was only 30 seconds long ouch….
19:01 minutes when ran with no network rendering
Gigabit Settings
6:05 when nodes set to gigabit and host was set to file server.
(That’s insane imagine if that 30 second clip were an hour long that would take 36 Hours but rendered on my setup with network rendering would roughly be 12 Hours!)
6:15 when all nodes were on at Gigabit and host was on edit machine not file server
100 Mb Settings
8:27 seconds when host was set to file server and all network settings were at 100Mb
22:58 when the default host was my edit machine and not the server while set at 100 mb
A video clip that was 2:44 seconds long with a mild secondary color correction took
22:29 render stand alone
Gigabit Settings
3:02 default Host Render
2:47 file server Host Render Near real time!
100 Mb Network settings
Default Host Render - Stopped it at 11% on the stitching part it was near 15 minutes blah couldn’t wait!
5:31 file server Host Render
Man this is awesome!!!!
The only thing is I wish they would change the limit of two render nodes, or at least let us by additional ones individually for say $25.00 or something it seems really strange that it goes from either 2 nodes to a site license which I don’t even want to no the price on that.
Oh and if some of my calculations are off go ahead correct me I’m to tired to care at this point ;-)